I have an old Compaq Presario laptop with a beautifull 14-inch-screen, a brand new battery, and a wireless internet card. It's not really usefull, though, because the processor is pretty slow. So, I made it into an "iBook". Using VNC, Virtual Network Computing (
www.realvnc.com), I connect to a special account on my Powermac from the laptop, then I get a full-screen view of the desktop, and I can use the keyboard and mouse.
My compaq has linux installed on it (Fedora), so I just used the VNC Viewer client from the VNC website (above) to connect. The VNC server software that I had on the Powermac is included in the Help app on this website. I was able to configure VNC so that I could work on the Compaq and Powermac at the same time
on different accounts This is a lot more usefull than just logging onto the main account on the powermac because this way, I have two macs, instead of one. Configure the VNC server software on a seperate account than your main account to do this, and set the number of the display in the vnc server software to 0. Then, log out of this account and go back into your main account. After this, you can log into the seperate account from a laptop, while still using the main account on your main computer.
The only downfall to this is that your desktop is downloaded through your wireless connection, so it can be "laggy". You won't notice anything when you are typing or scrolling small windows, but dashboard, page scrolling, dragging, etc will be slow. Don't even think about movies. Acctualy, the pages will scroll, dashboard will work, etc, but the information comes in bursts, so if you click on the dashboard, for example, it takes about a second to load, then it's there. It's not really slow, you just don't get a good enough framerate to see the "drifting in" action. To me, this was an acceptable loss for a $100-dollar "ibook" ($100 for a new battery). Simmilar laptops to mine go on ebay for around 50 bucks..
This might seem stupid to advanced users, but I thought it was really cool
. Feel free to ask questions if you try this and it dosent work.
EDIT: pics added